To follow a song, to trace its roots and genealogy, to consider the context of its emergence as well as its lineage. To consider how sound and song propels political movement. To trace histories and concepts through the enunciative force of sound, of song. This is the work of Shana L. Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014). Redmond is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California and the 2014-2015 Ella Baker Visiting Associate Professo of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, with research interests in music and popular culture, history and social movements, labor and working-class studies and critical ethnic studies. And this is to say nothing of her interests inAfrican Diaspora and Black political and social life. All these interests are made explicit within Anthem, a book that compels readers and listeners not only to ask questions about bygone eras, but to consider the soundscapes and beat drops of their own milieus. Redmond’s work, in other words, causes readers to consider the efficacy of sound and song making as the vibratory force that inheres in any social mood and movement. Anthem‘s power lies in the attention Redmond gives the circulation of sound and song: how each emerges from specific contexts as well as how songs end up being contested sonic sites wherein an intellectual practice of justice organizing can be articulated and Black sociality and personhood asserted and contended.

In particular, Redmond utilizes the concept of the Black anthem as a theoretical tool in order to consider the efficacy of organizing and fighting against practices of racism, sexism and imperialism. Redmond documents Black anthems as “sonic productions” that “were not ancillary, background noise” but “were absolutely central to the unfolding politics because they held within them the doctrines and beliefs of the people who participated in their performance” (8). That sounds, that songs, have so much potential to enunciate otherwise modes of living; that sounds, that songs, have within them the capacity to announce otherwise worlds, is something well known to those violently excluded from modernity and its epistemologies of the human, the citizen, the subject. We know this otherwise mode of living, this otherwise modality of world, affectively. And this affectivity is born out in aesthetic practice. Thus, to attend to the organizing of sound – as song – and how such musics made their way from, for example, Harlem to Cuba in the case of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s “Ethiopia” or from women’s singing in Charleston to international stages, is all within the analysis and the archives offered by Redmond. What pleases is how her historical archival work is inflected by sonic analyses of songs; Redmond discusses the musicality of songs, how chord changes, harmonies, and melodies offer fresh insight into ways to think sonically about the movement of sound and song.

Anthem appeals to those interested in Black social movements of the twentieth-century, to be sure. But the book also makes musicological argumentation central to its thesis. So, for example, readers not only learn about lyrical content and history of brothers James Weldon and John Rosamond Johnsons’ “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” but they are also compelled to think about the song in its sonic registers, with its musicological features. For example,

The first measure of the vocal line is a half measure and offers a running start to the A-flat major key signature, with the text ‘lift ev’-ry’ notated by three eight notes in the 6/8 time signature. While the song was written in 6/8, its performance follows a 12/8 phrasing, placing it alongside the Black gospel tradition, which…was growing in dynamic ways at this very moment. The quick introduction leads the vocalist to a strong tonic chord on the downbeat of measure 2. The melodic emphasis lands on the word ‘voice’ with ‘and sing’ (measures 10 and 11) following as long notes (72-3).

This so say that Redmond takes seriously the ways songs are constructed as part of the argument she wants to put forward about the efficacy of the Black anthem. Her work models how to attend to the musicological as a fundamental feature of sound and song-making in Black sociality.

In considering the context of emergence for sounds and songs, Redmond produces a text that fits squarely within Black performance theory, since she is less concerned with the rightness or wrongness and much more with the efficacy of performance. The concern and the question of efficacy displaces the necessity for results-driven analyses in Black performance theory, placing emphases on how the production of sound and song proliferates, how it finds life, how it creates – while also being created by – worlds. Impressively, Redmond’s thorough sonic-historical approach to her archive gives her method resonance beyond even its richness. Anthem can be radicalized through generalizing its treatment of to songs as objects that are both part of and propel movements, enabling us to consider the context of emergence for any song and performance. Generalizing Anthem means that readers would take seriously the attempt to move from the specific sonic moment to the general, from various, plural moments of emergence to considering how sounds and songs move, how they create otherwise temporalities and spatial zones. Anthem produces a new theory of thinking relation between specific performances and their history and social movements, both in local and in global diasporic contexts.

In addition, Redmond analyzes how songs–and sounds within such songs–can at times be utilized to further racialist, sexist, imperialist impulses and practices. For example, Redmond analyzes “Ol’ Man River” in multiple forms and contexts, including the performance changes produced by Paul Robeson. Here Redmond begins the tension in the dialect as written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Robeson’s deployment of the song in performance.

The dialect demonstrates a particular version of blackness out of sync with the ‘fine intelligence’ of Robeson, a Phi Beta Kappa scholar at Rutgers University and Columbia Law School graduate. Hammerstein’s dialect not only distinguishes Black from white in the musical but also serves to contain the Black characters in their natural state as uneducated and simple laborers and confidants (105).

Thus, sound and song can also be deployed otherwise, can be used in order to critique, to produce an intervention into such normative conceptions of blackness. And from Redmond’s text, readers learn something of Robeson’s radicalizing, of his deep engagement with thinking global blackness, through the way he changed the lyrical content, and thus the dialect and mood, of “Ol’ Man River.”

Paul Robeson Leading Moore Shipyard Workers in the “Star Spangled Banner,” Oakland, CA, September 1942, Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration Still Picture Branch, Record Group 208, National Archives Identifier: 535874

Ultimately, Anthem produced for me the occasion to wonder if we can think the very concept of diaspora otherwise, as a following of vibrational moods and movements, as antiphonal participation in an ongoing call. And as an ongoing call that is resistive in its enunciation, that is ongoing and open-ended. If we did so, perhaps we would also come to understand Black sociality otherwise. In other words, perhaps we can think of it as making a claim on us, a ceaseless and performative ceaseless pulse that beckons and convokes. We are then forced to consider what our response will be to this ongoing call, what reply and resolve we give. In such a response, reply and resolve will have been irreducible, will have had no grounds, will have been constant. Sound and song are resistant to any desire for capture because of the internal disruptive capacities of vibration. Whatever the sound, whatever the song, it has within it vibration, vibration as the materiality that makes anything audible, that gives anything over to its possibly being heard. And if vibration is the grounds from which sound and song emerge, if thoughts of diaspora and blackness and sociality were inflected through such vibration, what we are called to consider is the ongoing sound, the ongoing echo, the ongoing verve and materiality of otherwise modes of living into the world.

As vibrational, Anthem forces readers to think of possibilities for sociality not grounded in categorical distinction as pure or as possibly maintained. “Through anthems,” Redmond argues, “the delineation between art and politics as well as listener and actor is blurred” (2). This blurring can be radicalized as a generalized feature of Black performance as theory and critical intervention into the normative world that depends upon invented–and distinct–categories in order to produce ongoing violence. In their accounting, the sounds, songs, and sonicity of blackness, Black sociality and Black antiphonal force demand a radical rethinking of categorical distinctions of racial classifications, gender binaries, and nation-states. And their vibrations resonate outward. On and on and on and on.

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Featured Image: American Civil Rights Movement leaders singing on the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Photo Credit: Bettman/Corbis

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Ashon Crawleyis Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Ethnic Studies Department of University of California, Riverside. He earned his doctoral degree from Duke University in the English Department with a certificate in African and African American Studies. Before Duke, he attended the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, earning a Master of Theological Studies degree with a concentration in feminist thought and queer theology. His research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black Studies, Performance Theory and Sound Studies, Philosophy and Theology, Black Feminist and Queer theories. He has published work in Current Musicology; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society; The Journal of Theology and Sexuality; Black Theology: An International Journal and in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. He is completing my first manuscript, titled Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, which investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective intellectual practice. this work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship by engaging queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy and visual studies.

I grew up the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ in the Northeast. . .New Jersey, to be exact. And it was this particular religious and cultural world that gave me an appreciation for what music – and sound more generally – can do to move people, to have them inspired and changed. I’d like to expand on Regina Bradley’s recent post, OutKast and the Sounds of the Southern Black Church, and her theorizing of sound and space by remixing, spinning and scratching it, by grounding my reflection in a specific religious tradition in which I am most familiar. Thus, I want to use Black Pentecostalism in the United States and its performance of song and sound to better understand and critique the ideas of authenticity and voice we find in the performance of groups like OutKast.

Bradley’s piece traces Outkast’s borrowings from the Southern Black Church; I want to ask, what if borrowing from a common store is a way of theological life, not as theft, but as a means to producing a social world where sound and song are both gift and object of exchange? The concept of authenticity is a peculiar problem for music performance because implied within it are questions of who has the right to perform certain sounds and songs, or more pointedly, can any one group or even individual “own” a set of sounds and songs? I think that within the sound world of Black Pentecostalism (though not exclusively there) is the idea that music and sound exist in a public zone, a zone that is fugitive and insurrectionary. The public zone of music and sound experienced in Pentecostalism problematizes authenticity, ownership and the question of who can reproduce such musics.

The notion of the public zone helps us to understand the so-called authentic voice differently. Rather than it being the “ground zero” instance of purity or the discovery of some sort of truth or “essence,” I think of authentic voice as fundamentally a social experiment. The performance of song and sound from the public zone is a social experiment in that singing and sounding out are tentative, improvisational processes and they arise to the performance’s occasion. The social experient of utilizing song and sound produces inflection, accent, and most importantly, critical distance from other performances. Perhaps authenticity is not a reaching toward a foundational claim of origin/ality, but is a reaching outward, an extension, a centrifugal dance and play that seeks escape and refuge, creating sonic spaces in which one can inhabit that are, at the same time, the public zones in and through which contact occurs.

Price’s play is most pronounced, I think, by the way she leaves the song undone, at a particular height, swell, spiritedness. Price left the song as it was – as a social experiment – available for others to enter into performance with her in the space of the refused lyrical end. Jesus can help us…Jesus (…) Refusing to sing the sounded word “alone”functions not merely as a placeholder, but as a reworking of the performance itself. In leaving the song undone, she leaves it critically open. At the end of Price’s incompletion, the organist’s chording changes tonal centers, from major mode to reflective minor with augmented and suspended chords or what Bradleymight call, “takin’ em to chu[r]ch.”

"Dancing in the Spirit" by Richard Masoner

But and also: Price could not contain the song to the lyrics. Words don’t go there. She screamed, she spoke in tongues, she used melisma, slurred speech, bent notes and exaggerated forms of vibrato. That is, the song itself functioned as a point of transition, as a vessel to be filled with voice as she was a vessel of outpouring. Giving, taking, in the same breath, the same sound. She did not, it seems to me, desire to sing the song “correctly” and her performance of authenticity was not about the reproducibility of the traditional or “original” version. Just as the organist changed tonal centers at the end of her undone performance, so too singing from this Black Pentecostal religious, cultural public zone shifts epistemological centers – knowledge – of what is and is not singing, acceptable, holy. Her sound broke down the structures that mark her notes as “bent” and her vibrato as “exaggerated.” A normative mode of “correct” or “proper” singing from within this public zone would be to stifle creativity, surprise, discovery.

As a vessel, we can think of sound, song and subject as conduits for the exchange of ecstasy and ecstatics. The sonic public zone becomes, for Vernon Price’s improvisation of “I Must Tell Jesus,” a point of departure, where the song and the sounds she makes in it socialize, network, change. Songs and sounds, from within this zone, are available for a public engagement; the song and singers are both capacities to be filled, emptied and filled again. And I think the theological imperative of modern Pentecostalism – that the Holy Spirit fills the individual is important for performance tradition [this difference is indexed by the divergent questions: “did you see so-and-so catch the spirit” versus “does so-and-so have the Holy Ghost” and “when did you get filled with the Holy Ghost?”]. One is filled with the capacity to be filled, with the fullness of the spirit that is made evident by giving it away through song.

Vernon Oliver Price

As a vessel, we can think of sound, song and subject as conduits for the exchange of ecstasy and ecstatics. The sonic materiality of Price’s performance rubs up against and caresses, spins and spins off the performances that come previous to that moment in that church. This does not mean that she insouciantly called up the traditional in order to dismiss it. That would imply that Price was both lacking in attention and intentionality. What I think Price makes evident is how any performance of any song – the traditional “I Must Tell Jesus” included – occurs fundamentally within a social context. Any such performance – its “first” or the many that have come after it – are conduits, bridges. What we have then, by way of a sonic public zone, is a space that privileges the accrual of sound and song as a mode of sharing. The song was not created in order for Elisha Hoffman – writer of “I Must Tell Jesus” – to keep it. He got the song to share it and Price performed it to redouble such sharing. To be in a state of ecstasy is to be “beside oneself” and Price’s singing forced the song into ecstatic posture. Not only was she “beside herself” in praise to God, but she caused others to be beside as well, creating a new space for the beside of each self to celebrate and praise together.

Price riffed on the original, quickened herself to quicken others. She screamed because the heightened emotion moved her. And that heightened emotion moved others as well.